Thanks to all those who posted comments and to other friends who have written me about my blog post on the decision of the Princeton Classics department no longer to require its majors to study Greek or Latin.
These responses fall for the most part into two groups. Some shrug off the decision as a tempest in a very small teapot. No one seemed about to follow Princeton’s lead. Nor seemed worried that the field was infected with terminal “whiteness,” or was about to capitulate to the demands of “cancel culture.”Nor did they seem demoralized by the fact that a relatively large and well-endowed department was having trouble maintaining robust patterns of study in the field. In some cases it was just the opposite, some jubilation “We’re doing better than Princeton!”
These respondents report good things about the programs at their institutions, often emphasizing the success of two track arrangements, one requiring the study of the ancient languages, the other not. The number of majors may not be large, they say, but their institutions also give weight to minors in the field. The overall picture in these reports is, well, not so bad.
Whew! If these responses sometimes sound like whistling in the dark, their reports, though no random sample, are reassuring. Another group of respondents, however, took a broader and bleaker view, fearing, as one of them put it, that Classics was “the canary in the mineshaft,” gasping out a warning to other endangered fields of study.
Mea culpa: Denis Feeney of Princeton corrected the mistake I made in arguing that the problem was really a humanities problem, not specifically one affecting Classics. It was more wide-ranging than I had thought. Feeney pointed out;
“ the “pure” sciences at Princeton and other Ivies were under the cosh just like the humanities: everyone always goes on about STEM, but they really only care about TE: pure science and maths don’t count, and students are avoiding them as much as they are avoiding us.”
It's not just the humanities, stupid, and it’s not just Princeton. When well-designed programs are available in fields with clear practical applications and good job prospects,, students move into them, often in large numbers. A dean at another institution helped me gauge the magnitude of the shift in majors, reporting that at his institution over the past thirteen years the number of majors in computer science had gone from 100 to over 1,000. Under such circumstances it’s hard to win the zero sum game of enrolling majors.
Denis Feeneythen performed a virtuoso backward flip, tracing this movement back to something Dwight Eisenhower had observed in the famous speech he gave on leaving office in 1961.:
“Everyone always quotes his phrase “the military-industrial complex” from that speech, but this was only one of two main threats to freedom generated by the cold war, and the other was the threat to free and independent research (Section IV of his speech:. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp“)
In such a setting Classics departments because of their small size and high vulnerability are indeed the canary in the mineshaft. But just what is this canary singing? Not, one friend reminds me, a lament for Western Civilization, which, he assures me, is “not over (yet).”
Could the song be Nil Desperqndum?,. Classics has been through rough periods before – the abandonment of its privileged position when colleges and universities required all students to enroll in Latin classes, , and again when the free-wheeling elective system, introduced at Harvard in 1885 by President Charles Eliot, spread to other institutions; or when the G.I. bill changed the scale and scope of undergraduate education. . Faced with these and other changes the field of Classics has shown remarkable resilience (if I dare use that word after the discussion of it earlier in this blog.) Classics adapted, and in some respects bounced back stronger. That required, to be sure, imagination and innovation. An email from Jeff Henderson, the head of our profession’s Campus Advisory Service , called my attention to James Loeb’s comments in 1912 when the first Loeb volumes began appearing:
In an age … when men's minds are turning more than ever before to the practical and the material, it does not suffice to make pleas, however eloquent and convincing, for the safeguarding and further enjoyment of our greatest heritage from the past. Means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life.
The rhetoric sounds old fashioned today, but don’t let that obscure the boldness of Loeb’s move. We need, I am convinced, something of comparable vigor today.
So, Nil desperandum. Let’s focus on resilience.
These responses fall for the most part into two groups. Some shrug off the decision as a tempest in a very small teapot. No one seemed about to follow Princeton’s lead. Nor seemed worried that the field was infected with terminal “whiteness,” or was about to capitulate to the demands of “cancel culture.”Nor did they seem demoralized by the fact that a relatively large and well-endowed department was having trouble maintaining robust patterns of study in the field. In some cases it was just the opposite, some jubilation “We’re doing better than Princeton!”
These respondents report good things about the programs at their institutions, often emphasizing the success of two track arrangements, one requiring the study of the ancient languages, the other not. The number of majors may not be large, they say, but their institutions also give weight to minors in the field. The overall picture in these reports is, well, not so bad.
Whew! If these responses sometimes sound like whistling in the dark, their reports, though no random sample, are reassuring. Another group of respondents, however, took a broader and bleaker view, fearing, as one of them put it, that Classics was “the canary in the mineshaft,” gasping out a warning to other endangered fields of study.
Mea culpa: Denis Feeney of Princeton corrected the mistake I made in arguing that the problem was really a humanities problem, not specifically one affecting Classics. It was more wide-ranging than I had thought. Feeney pointed out;
“ the “pure” sciences at Princeton and other Ivies were under the cosh just like the humanities: everyone always goes on about STEM, but they really only care about TE: pure science and maths don’t count, and students are avoiding them as much as they are avoiding us.”
It's not just the humanities, stupid, and it’s not just Princeton. When well-designed programs are available in fields with clear practical applications and good job prospects,, students move into them, often in large numbers. A dean at another institution helped me gauge the magnitude of the shift in majors, reporting that at his institution over the past thirteen years the number of majors in computer science had gone from 100 to over 1,000. Under such circumstances it’s hard to win the zero sum game of enrolling majors.
Denis Feeneythen performed a virtuoso backward flip, tracing this movement back to something Dwight Eisenhower had observed in the famous speech he gave on leaving office in 1961.:
“Everyone always quotes his phrase “the military-industrial complex” from that speech, but this was only one of two main threats to freedom generated by the cold war, and the other was the threat to free and independent research (Section IV of his speech:. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp“)
In such a setting Classics departments because of their small size and high vulnerability are indeed the canary in the mineshaft. But just what is this canary singing? Not, one friend reminds me, a lament for Western Civilization, which, he assures me, is “not over (yet).”
Could the song be Nil Desperqndum?,. Classics has been through rough periods before – the abandonment of its privileged position when colleges and universities required all students to enroll in Latin classes, , and again when the free-wheeling elective system, introduced at Harvard in 1885 by President Charles Eliot, spread to other institutions; or when the G.I. bill changed the scale and scope of undergraduate education. . Faced with these and other changes the field of Classics has shown remarkable resilience (if I dare use that word after the discussion of it earlier in this blog.) Classics adapted, and in some respects bounced back stronger. That required, to be sure, imagination and innovation. An email from Jeff Henderson, the head of our profession’s Campus Advisory Service , called my attention to James Loeb’s comments in 1912 when the first Loeb volumes began appearing:
In an age … when men's minds are turning more than ever before to the practical and the material, it does not suffice to make pleas, however eloquent and convincing, for the safeguarding and further enjoyment of our greatest heritage from the past. Means must be found to place these treasures within the reach of all who care for the finer things of life.
The rhetoric sounds old fashioned today, but don’t let that obscure the boldness of Loeb’s move. We need, I am convinced, something of comparable vigor today.
So, Nil desperandum. Let’s focus on resilience.